MobileMe hitting end-of-life, going free?

We’ve been saying and hoping for quite some time now that Apple’s e-mail and cloud service, MobileMe, would become free in order to compete with Google. It looks like that may be happening sooner than expected as leaked screen shots of Apple’s system show MobileMe hitting EOL, or end of life.

If you were considering signing up for the service, or maybe extending it soon, it might be wise to hold off for a little while longer. On Wednesday, March 2, Apple will be holding an event for the iPad 2, so maybe we can expect an announcement about MobileMe, too.

Right now, MobileMe offers e-mail, data storage and sharing and contacts and calendar syncing, too. For the basic user, you get about 20GB of data to play with for anywhere between $69-99 per year depending on the retailer from whom you purchased the service, and the deals they’re offering at the time. If the service does become free, it might be free with smaller data limits – perhaps 2GB for all Apple users, and tiered packages if you want more storage.

It’s pretty difficult to speculate what Apple will do with the service if it does become free, or where paid users will be left if they still have some time left on their packages. But if the free service has more limitations than the former paid options, perhaps Apple will let users like myself ride it out. An option to renew the current package could be nice, too. I guess we’ll find out next week.